Saturday, July 24, 2010

One of the great things about making photobooks is that you get to swap with friends and colleagues who share the same passion. So it was with pleasure that Andrew Phelps gave me a copy of his new photo / artist's book, 720 (2 times around). Self-published this year in an edition of 100 the book is a reminiscence and meditation on Phelps' life as a skateborder 20 years ago.But the book is more than just that. Comprising photographs made amongst "the relics of corporate wasteland" taken over by kids as a their own skater paradise, the pictures are about loss, change and impermanence. The pictures give me the feeling that I love to find in photography, the sense that something I don't know about has happened here and something else is about to happen. The book is a conceptual piece full of unintentional art works that came about out of circumstance and were brought to life through Phelps' eye and camera. Scenarios given another life beyond the obvious and beyond the original corporate intention and later that of the skateboarders.

This is a book that I have returned to many times and I see something fresh every time. If you're lucky you might be able to still get hold of a copy by going to Andrew's site: http://www.andrew-phelps.com/

About Me

My pictures explore the strange anthropology of cities. The unusual and overlooked in the human landscape.
I am asking the viewer to question the idea that photographs as documents are complete representations of subject.
I'm interested in the universality of life and the idea of parallel lives - when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there. The democracy of non-places fascinates me, in the knowledge that inevitably nothing is as it seems.
I work and live between Auckland and Paris.
http://harveybenge.com/
email:harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz